Well, there is no effective opposition. The Democrats are in a complete muddle, leaderless and rudderless. All of the Republican opposition to the Musk oligarchy has been driven out or marginalised. Who honestly is going to listen to a Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney now? Trump doesn't even need to try and hound them, they've become irrelevant. The readers of NY Times and Washington Post are outraged, but they're the minority even if a sizeable minority.

What I think might bring Trump down is what I'm expecting him to deliver: an economic mess (if not catastrophe, and let's hope not). He still thinks, to this day, that the Chinese pay the American tarrifs on their exports and nobody can persuade him otherwise. He lives in an alternative reality, one devoid of fact, but the unfortunate thing is that tens of millions of people have decided to join him there.

:100:

Somebody now buying a Tesla will make a clear political statement. — ssu

I read an article, I think even before the election, about some lucky internet trader, who's making a small fortune selling these bumper stickers:

What basically is happening in the US is what happened in Hungary. Basically one should learn what Victor Orban has achieved in Hungary, as that would be the objective of Trump. — ssu

The media has been reporting the Republican infatuation with Orban for a long time https://wapo.st/40KD1NN . The Republican Party, or should we now say, the MAGA party, is clearly wanting to implement something similar.

As I see it, the modern period is characteristically domineering rather than receptive. It is a kind of grasping at being God, which is the antithesis of Philippians 2:6. Everything is in our hands; everything is up to us; knowledge is primarily something we do; we are the occupants of the view from nowhere; and making-knowledge is the highest form of knowledge. Now Scientism is a kind of grotesque epitome of this attitude, and one which is widely recognized to be aberrant. But it is only an epitome. That is, the basic mindset is much more widespread than Scientism. — Leontiskos

Agree. I've often remarked that the mentality of modern culture can be summed up in the motto 'nihil ultra ego'. The Cartesian ego becomes the fulcrum, the arbiter, of truth, buttressed on the ramparts of scientific truth. And this is fundamental to liberal individualism. (Not that I would prefer any kind of social collectivism per Asiatic cultures.)

Democratic space must remain inside itself. To put it in Latin: It must be immanent. Tocqueville noticed that aristocratic man was constantly sent back to something that is placed outside his own self, something above him. Democratic man, on the other hand, refers only to himself.

The democratic social space is not only flat but closed. And it is closed because it is has to be flat. What is outside, whatever claims to have worth and authority in itself and not as part of the game, must be excluded. Whoever and whatever will not take a seat at the table at the same level as all other claims and authorities, however mundane, is barred from the game. — Remi Braque

(I'm a bit disquieted to find myself in agreement with these sentiments, as part of me sees it as reactionary conservatism, but it can't be helped.)

However - the post of mine that you quoted from, while related to all of the above, attempts to analyse it from a specific perspective: that of the history of ideas, and the decline and fall of classical metaphysics. There's a quote given in the Joshua Hochschild lecture that we've discussed previously:

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence. — Richard Weaver, Ideas have Consequences

For what it's worth, I agree with this sentiment. I see the advent of materialism as inextricably connected with abandonment of the understanding of universals (scholastic or Aristotelian realism.) Not that there wasn't a great deal of dogma in those musty schools that had to be jettisoned, but that something vitally important went with it. Why? Because of the very nature of universals or Augustine's 'intelligible objects': real but immaterial. And as you will know, it was the capacity of nous to apprehend those immaterial realities which was the very essence of the rational psuchē. Thereafter the link between intellect and faith was severed, culminating in Luther's salvation by faith alone and the fideistic nature of much of modern Christianity.

That's the background to the idea I'm trying to sketch out in the post I asked you to comment on. I think I might make it subject of an essay (even if I'm out of my depth in much of it.)

I believe this is what Hume does as well, so it must have been a trend at that time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Right! As Ludwig says

I would attribute this to his empiricist approach to philosophy, especially to the doctrine that all our knowledge comes from the senses. — Ludwig V

That's the source of it.

I don't know about Thomism in enough detail to respond to that alternative approach in detail, though I think I can see the sense in it. — Ludwig V

I'm no scholar of Thomism, but I've got a grasp of the basic outlines of what Edward Feser (who's a good source in these matters) calls 'Aristotelian-Thomist' (A-T) philosophy - Aristotle's matter-form philosophy. I also read a little of Jacques Maritain, who was hugely influential in the Catholic left in the mid 20th c. and a profound philosopher. From whom The Cultural Impact of Empiricism:

For Empiricism there is no essential difference between the intellect and the senses. The fact which obliges a correct theory of knowledge to recognize this essential difference is simply disregarded. What fact? The fact that the human intellect grasps, first in a most indeterminate manner, then more and more distinctly, certain sets of intelligible features -- that is, natures, say, the human nature -- which exist in the real as identical with individuals, with Peter or John for instance, but which are universal in the mind and presented to it as universal objects, positively one (within the mind) and common to an infinity of singular things (in the real).

Thanks to the association of particular images and recollections, a dog reacts in a similar manner to the similar particular impressions his eyes or his nose receive from this thing we call a piece of sugar or this thing we call an intruder; he does not know what is 'sugar' or what is 'intruder'. He plays, he lives in his affective and motor functions, or rather he is put into motion by the similarities which exist between things of the same kind; he does not see the similarity, the common features as such. What is lacking is the flash of intelligibility; he has no ear for the intelligible meaning. He has not the idea or the concept of the thing he knows, that is, from which he receives sensory impressions; his knowledge remains immersed in the subjectivity of his own feelings -- only in man, with the universal idea, does knowledge achieve objectivity. And his field of knowledge is strictly limited: only the universal idea sets free -- in man -- the potential infinity of knowledge.

Such are the basic facts which Empiricism ignores, and in the disregard of which it undertakes to philosophize.

The US government doesn't even have a health service — unenlightened

"Fast fact: As of November 2022, Medicaid and Child's Health Insurance Program covered more than 91.7 million individuals in the United States."

Any system that doesn't have proper safeguards is bound to such a fate, surely? — Outlander

But it does have layers of safeguards, very strict security requirements. But Musk and his troupe just barge in, basically saying 'Don't you know who we are??' and demanding access. Some of the Musk personnel didn't even have the level 1 security clearances required to gain authorisation. The story relates that some of the senior officials in those departments that tried to refuse Musk access were told that US Marshalls would be called and they would be arrested unless they complied. This is the outrage of it - there has been no vetting, no Congressional approval, no real authority beyond Musk invoking the support of Trump. (There's also a story circulating that some of those who tried to refuse access to Musk will now be facing indictment for interferring with Government enquiries.)

So, I'm not sure if the problem with a populist demagogue is a dearth of democracy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Very sane post, as always. Trump is a demagogue, of that there is not a shred of doubt. But Elon Musk's activities are another dimension to his disastrous rule. Do peruse that article linked in the OP.

I've just now had a most illuminating and insightful conversation with ChatGPT 4 which started with the distinction between noumena and the ding an sich in Kant, and wended its way through the real meaning of noumena and whether Kant understood noesis, then touching on phenomenology and recent critiques of Kant.

“Oh, hey, we’re going to impose huge sanctions on our two nearest and main trading partners, Mexico and Canada. …Wait on. What? They’re on the phone? Lemme talk to them…”

“OK, we’re NOT going to impose huge sanctions on our two nearest and main trading partners, Mexico and Canada. They were real nice to me, told me what a great president I am, and said they’ll send troops.”

Yet more ‘volleys of incompetence’, as the NYT put it last week.

Meanwhile, Trump is insisting that the FBI is 'corrupt' and that the investigations into the January 6th insurrection and his illegal retention of classified documents were the 'weaponisation of the Justice Department' which should 'never happen again'. :vomit:

Anyone else? Surely there must be an alarm bell ringing somewhere about this?

You just earned yourself a place on my banned list. Have a nice life.

I’ve been a member here since inception and hardly recall him being mentioned. I’ve read some references to him and articles about him, but he’s one of those philosophers whose work is so voluminous that it would require considerable reading to get a start. Others may have a different view of course. That said, if you could point to something pithy and on-point I’d be more than happy to read it.

You sound remarkably sanguine about it.

There is no solution within the framework of democracy — frank

So let’s get rid of it.

So this is about it for you, Frank?

No good trying to kick into the long grass of ruminations about democracy. It’s your breakfast they’re going to be eating. Besides, the leading statement is completely untrue: democracies can limit spending simply by agreeing to do so.

Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro also became the heads of state in Venezuela through democratic means. But once they got there, the democratic means that they used began to show their limits. — Arcane Sandwich

It is more than probable that DJT is preparing exactly the same methods for the U.S. I mean, he's already demonstrating it - many of his executive orders in the first two weeks of his Presidency might be unconstitutional and/or illegal - but how can they be challenged? He's gutting the Justice Department and purging the FBI of anyone deemed disloyal - classical authoritarian moves. Fox News was complaining that the Democrats are 'shredding the Constitution' by stalling the confirmation of Trump's dangerous Cabinet selections. Republican Congressmen have already started talking about how to remove the two-term limit for Trump. And so on. You're seeing the birth of an authoritarian political regime right in front of your eyes.

"33. OF REAL THINGS AND IDEAS OR CHIMERAS.--The ideas imprinted on the Senses by the Author of nature are called REAL THINGS; and those excited in the imagination being less regular, vivid, and constant, are more properly termed IDEAS, or IMAGES OF THINGS, which they copy and represent. But then our sensations, be they never so vivid and distinct, are nevertheless IDEAS, that is, they exist in the mind, or are perceived by it, as truly as the ideas of its own framing. The ideas of Sense are allowed to have more reality in them, that is, to be more (1)STRONG, (2)ORDERLY, and (3)COHERENT than the creatures of the mind; but this is no argument that they exist without the mind. They are also (4)LESS DEPENDENT ON THE SPIRIT or thinking substance which perceives them, in that they are excited by the will of another and more powerful spirit; yet still they are IDEAS, and certainly no IDEA, whether faint or strong, can exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it. ~ Berkeley"

Not only does he distinguish between - let's call them - real appearances - and - "chimeras" - unreal appearances but he also allows the existence of something beyond or behind appearances. . — Ludwig V

Thanks for producing those particular paragraphs, as it toucheth on something ( ;-) ) which a neo-thomist such as Edward Feser would say is radical shortcoming in the Bishop's philosophy.

It is that Berkeley collapses the distinction between sensation, imagination, and intellectual abstraction (for example in this post by Feser). In Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, intellect plays a regulative role, actively grasping universal Forms rather than just passively receiving impressions. Without this distinction, Berkeley’s account of knowledge risks reducing all cognition to subjective perceptions, which an Aristotelian would find inadequate - his "ideas" seem to be more like what the Thomist would designate phantasms (mental images) rather than concepts grasped by intellect. As a result, his theory of knowledge risks reducing rational thought to subjective perception rather than a proper engagement with reality. So, a Thomist critic might say, 'Yes, reality depends on God, but not in the way Berkeley imagines. The world’s intelligibility does not arise because God perceives it—it arises because God has endowed it with form and finality, which reason can grasp independently of sensory perception.'

@Count Timothy von Icarus, @Leontiskos

I did post about that too, but I also heard that the Musk crew access was read-only, which means something. But still, it's an absolute outrage. People should be on the streets, although I guess that'd give Trump a chance to try out his new crowd-control methods.

Amor Fati is Nietzsche's equation that replicates the Glad Tidings of Jesus Christ. — DifferentiatingEgg

But without loaves and fishes, presumably.

This is getting really, really serious. Musk is completely out of control. When the idea of the government expenditure review was mooted, it was supposed Musk's committee would propose draconian cuts to Congress, and there'd be the usual argy bargy. But no! He's barged into the actual finance departments offices, and started looking at line item expenditures for things he wants to cut, after they've all been cleared by Congress. It's blatantly illegal. But Trump has already committed so many blatantly illegal actions in his first two weeks in office, that nobody knows how to respond. He's doing what Bannon says - flooding the zone with shit. But in this case, the shit involves literally trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of jobs, entire Government agencies. He and Musk are literally tearing apart Government in full public view, and they've hardly even gotten started yet.

And don't forget, SCOTUS has declared that the President has full immunity for official acts. So if anyone challenges Trump, he'll just shrug and say they're official acts, so sue me. And who's that lucky litigant going to be?

Pity those poor government employees - and there are literally tens of thousand of them - who's livelihoods are being threatened, and who's projects are being shelved or cut in front of their eyes. What is happening in the US right now is a massive atrocity.

Oh, and the reason USAID are being called 'radical lunatics' is simply because the staff tend to being - and for completely obvious reasons - Democratic-leaning. And that is a disqualifying attribute in the emerging One Party State of MAGA.

In Christianity (and Plato before that) what animates human beings is the (holy) spirit, that is the general and immaterial which breaths life into the lifeless body. — ChatteringMonkey

By the time Nietzsche arrives, the concept of 'the immaterial' has been largely misunderstood. Reconstructing it, the original term in Greek, (as I understand it, and as one not schooled in Ancient Greek) was psuchē (subject of Aristotle's 'On the Soul'), a term which is now generally translated as psyche, or mind. The Greek term however encompassed the totality of the being - which in modern terms would also include the sub- and unconscious aspects - and also qualities such as traits, dispositions and drives.

Aristotle held that the psuchē is the form or essence of any living thing rather than a distinct substance from the body (using the philosophical, not everyday, sense of 'substance'.) It is the possession of psuche (of a specific kind) that makes an organism an organism at all - the psuchē is the 'form of the body' as is often quoted, and nous the rational faculty (that faculty which is able to grasp rational principles.) It is the rational faculty (nous) within psuchē that grasps the essence of things, and this rational capacity is what makes it immaterial. Why? As Platonist scholar Lloyd Gerson put it,

Aristotle, in De Anima, argued that thinking in general (which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking) cannot be a property of a body; it cannot, as he put it, 'be blended with a body'. This is because in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible ('the psuche contains all things'). Among other things, this means that you could not engage in thought if the mind were purely a function of a physical organ. Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.

….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too. — Platonism vs Naturalism, Lloyd Gerson

Obviously a lot to be said about all of this, but the point is that, after having been incorporated into theology as 'the immortal spirit', the original Aristotelian understanding was largely lost sight of (although preserved in Thomas Aquinas and other works of philosophical theology.) But it comes across much more like an invisible entity, which no sensible person ought to believe in, when originally it was a more subtle concept.

Nietzsche (and later Heidegger) were right to critique how 'spirit' became reified into a static, unchanging entity. However, I wonder whether this critique fully accounts for the dynamic aspects of Christian Platonism, which in its more sophisticated forms retained a more fluid understanding of soul and intellect. I suspect much of Nietzsche’s critique is aimed at a simplified, institutionalized understanding of 'spirit'—one that had been drilled into generations of students through rote learning and dogmatic instruction, often devoid of its original philosophical depth.

Another egregious and disastrous set of decisions are completely undermining US Agency for International Development, the main vehicle by means of which billions of dollars of US aid is disbursed globally across all manner of charity and aid organisations. It has >10,000 employees and disburses more than $50 billion annually. The entire organisation has been thrown into chaos, with the main website taken offline and all spending frozen, with rumours that it is to become absorbed by the State Department and its activities and funding slashed.

Again, the Musk oligarchy has been central to this, barging into secure offices and demanding access to confidential files and systems. Musk is acting like an overlord, with greater authority than any Federal official or deparmental secretary, and complete discretion in deciding what does or doesn't constitute proper spending of US dollars.

The placement of the security officials (of US AID) — John Voorhees and his deputy — on administrative leave is the latest effort by the Trump administration and Musk to wrest control of the world’s largest provider of food assistance, which they have denigrated without offering evidence as left-wing and corrupt amid objections from Democratic and Republican lawmakers.

Amid the turmoil at the agency, Matt Hopson, the USAID chief of staff and a political appointee, resigned, according to a current and former USAID official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. Hopson did not respond to requests for comment.Voorhees was put on leave after he did not allow DOGE officials to access a sensitive compartmented information facility — commonly known as a “SCIF” — an ultra-secure room where officials and government contractors take extraordinary precautions to review highly classified information, according to three current and former USAID officials.

A group of about eight DOGE officials entered the USAID building Saturday and demanded access to every door and floor, despite only a few of them having security clearance, according to senior Senate Democratic staff members who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the incident.

When USAID personnel attempted to block access to some areas, DOGE officials threatened to call federal marshals, one of the Democratic aides said. The DOGE officials were eventually given access to “secure spaces” including the security office. — USAID Security Officials on Leave after Refusing Musk Allies

Imagine the predicament of those staffers, many of whom have dedicated their lives to the welfare of their recipient states and nations, who's entire careers are now being ended under the MAGA jackboots.

A fool is “happy” when his cravings are satisfied. A warrior is happy without reason.

-Dan Millman's Way of the Peaceful Warrior — Patterner

:up: I think this requires qualities of character. Notably, poise. And the appropriate orientation or attitude. The society we live in is such that it doesn't recognise those qualities, rather it relies on continual stimulation to incite cravings and consumption, hence we all become 'consumers'. Being 'happy without reason' entails throwing that off, which is not necessarily an easy thing to do.

My feeling is, Schopenhauer did not, himself, cultivate that kind of personal discipline - not wanting to be overly judgemental, as I'm no paragon. But I suspect that the kind of life he lead, didn't really lend itself to attaining any kind of real poise or equanimity, which is why he wrote so much about being disturbed by boredom and craving.

But those who overcome the impulses of lust and anger which arise in the body are made whole and live in joy. They find their joy, their rest, and their light completely within themselves. — Sri Krishna

The yamas (Sanskrit: यम, romanized: yama), and their complement, the niyamas, represent a series of "right living" or ethical rules within Yoga philosophy. The word yama means "reining in" or "control". They are restraints for proper conduct given in the Vedas and the Yoga Sutras as moral imperatives, commandments, rules or goals. The yamas are a "don't"s list of self-restraints, typically representing commitments that affect one's relations with others and self. The complementary niyamas represent the "do"s. Together yamas and niyamas are personal obligations to live well. — Wikipedia,Yamas

They always said you learn something every day. Especially on the Internet.

Actually one thought that came to me during that talk. Schopenhauer says life is a pendulum swinging between boredom and disappointment. When you do something pleasurable, it disappoints because it’s never as good as it promised, it doesn’t last and you start looking for new pleasures. But if you don’t get pleasure, then life is boring. Boo hoo!

I put it to those I was talking to, that this is simply a description of ‘egoic consciousness’ (something I’m well acquainted with), that is always seeking pleasure or satisfaction in the sensory domain. I remember a talk from a Tibetan Lama decades ago, where he made the same point, referring to Mick Jagger singing ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’. It’s the nature of pleasure, the ‘hedonic treadmill’.

Schopenhauer seems to think it can only be ameliorated by the sublimity of high art or a severe asceticism (which so far as we know he never practiced.) But life has its simple pleasures too, and - something Schopenhauer does acknowledge - there is also an enduring satisfaction in being empathetic to the suffering of others. As always, I’ll do more reading, but I do think Schopenhauer’s pessimism was lacking in that regard.

delightfully apophatic. :lol:

Apropos of which, I asked ChatGPT whether Wittgenstein was ever funny.



My favourite is the bricklayer one. :rofl:

You're welcome. I'm Sydney born and bred although now live about 90 minutes west in the picturesque Blue Mountains. Anyway, it was a salutary reminder of my probably rose-coloured attitude to Schop, he was an old curmudgeon in some ways. Still, a genius in my book, and worth the effort of reading.

I'm going to comment in this thread because the Trump thread has it's own dedicated MAGA troll.

So, two utterly and profoundly worrying developments.

The first is that Elon Musk and his troupe have now been granted access privileges to the Treasury system that disburses ALL US Government payments to every individual and organisation (NYT Gift Link).

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to the federal payment system late on Friday, according to five people familiar with the change, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

The new authority follows a standoff this week with a top Treasury official who had resisted allowing Mr. Musk’s lieutenants into the department’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. The official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute, according to people familiar with his exit.

The system could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks.

Mr. Musk, who has been given wide latitude by President Trump to find ways to slash government spending, has recently fixated on Treasury’s payment processes, criticizing the department in a social media post on Saturday for not rejecting more payments as fraudulent or improper.

This is a guy who has never held an elected office. He's putting his lieutenants into Government buildings and scrutinising all the outgoing funds. (Incidentally there's also pretty strong evidence that it was Musk that was behind the bulk email offering severance payments to practically the entire Federal beauracracy.)

The second development is Trump's demands for a list of all the FBI agents that worked on the Jan 6th insurrection and stolen documents cases. It seems many hundreds or even thousands of individuals could be fired or demoted for doing their jobs, following the exoneration pardoning of hundreds of insurrectionist police-bashers.

//update// I now read that the DOGE stooges only have read-only access to the disbursements system, which is not quite as Dr Strangelove as the initial story. But still….//

3.4 Holding a True Thought I spent quite a bit of time on this section, partly because it seems so repetitive and I am becoming a bit exasperrated by the repetive nature of the arguments.

Rödl acknowledges that many resist the idea that we are conscious of our own judgments only through second-order judgments. However, he points out that rejecting second-order judgement while still maintaining the force-content distinction is incoherent. The two positions are intimately linked: if judgment is structured into force (assent) and content (the thought), then self-awareness of judgment must be a separate act— meaning it entails second-order judgement, and that, If we reject second-order, we must also reject the force-content distinction.

If we accept the force-content distinction, then self-awareness of judgment is always a second-order act, which means the first-order judgment itself lacks inherent validity. This renders judgment passive or “dead,” lacking logical traction—it is just an attitude toward a thought rather than an act of understanding. (It means we have 'no dog in the fight' as the saying has it.)

Rödl reconstructs how the force-content distinction conceptualizes judgment: judging means assigning the value true to a thought. This is separate from thinking that it is correct to judge it is true, which is treated as a distinct second-order judgment. However, Rödl notes that recognizing that "it is right to hold p true if and only if p is true" already blurs this distinction because the act of judging and the act of thinking its correctness are intertwined.

Someone who possesses the concept of judgment can expand a judgment by adding, "and so it is right to assent to p." However, Rödl argues that this is only a superficial return to judgment—it does not reintegrate the act of judging with its validity but merely layers a second thought on top of it. The structure remains bifurcated.

Rödl then presents a scenario where someone affirms both p and ¬p, while also knowing that one must be false. This awareness does not necessarily mean they recognize that they themselves are making a contradictory judgment. The logic of the situation is understood, but it is not integrated into self-conscious awareness of one’s own act of judgment.

Where someone holds contradictory judgments:
*She judges that p is true.
*She judges that ¬p (not-p) is true.
*She also holds the meta-level belief that "it is correct to hold a thought true if and only if it is true."

From this, she can logically infer that someone (which might include her!) must be making an error.

At first glance, this seems unproblematic—she recognizes that something must be wrong with holding both p and ¬p as true. However, Rödl points out that if we separate force (the act of judging) from content (the thought being judged), nothing necessitates that she is aware that she herself is the one making the contradictory judgments.

This is the key flaw: if judgment is treated merely as assigning truth values to thoughts, rather than as an inherently self-conscious act (e.g. she knows she is thinking p), then contradictions can be recognized in an abstract way but without self-awareness. She can see that someone is in error, but there’s no necessity that she realizes she herself is the one making the mistake.

In other words, if the force-content distinction were correct, then logical contradiction would not necessarily lead to self-awareness of error, because judgment would not be inherently self-conscious.

Now, Rödl shifts the focus to inference. Suppose someone judges:

*A is true.
*B is true.
*She knows that if A and B are true, then C must be true.

Based on this, she judges that C is true.

So far, everything seems fine: she makes a logical inference. However, Rödl points out a crucial gap: nothing in this description implies that she is aware of having inferred C from A and B:

We cannot say that she knows that she holds a given thought true because judging something is understanding oneself to judge it. For then assigning the value true to a thought would be thinking it valid to assign this value to that thought. The act of holding true a content would be inside that content and the distinction of force and content would collapse. — p47

The problem, again, stems from treating judgment as merely assigning truth values to thoughts. If judgment were just about saying “A is true” and “B is true,” and then mechanically following a rule to conclude “C is true,” then there is no necessary awareness that she has performed an inference. In other words, she might have judged correctly but without knowing why she holds C true.

At this point, I was reminded of John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ argument. As is well-known, this thought-experiment is meant to challenge the idea that syntactic processing (mere symbol manipulation) is sufficient for understanding. Rödl’s critique of the force-content distinction exposes a similar issue: if judgment is just assigning truth values (a kind of syntactic operation), then the person making the judgment could go through all the correct logical steps without actually understanding what they mean—just like Searle’s man in the Chinese Room follows rules for manipulating Chinese symbols without understanding Chinese.

In both cases, the key problem is lack of intrinsic self-consciousness:

* The man in the Chinese Room manipulates symbols but does not understand them.
* The thinker who assigns truth values to thoughts (under the force-content distinction) can make inferences or recognize contradictions but does not necessarily recognize themselves as making these judgments.

Rödl’s position could be seen as a deep challenge to the very idea that cognition (or at least judgment) could ever be modeled in purely mechanistic, syntactic terms. Just as Searle insists that syntax is not sufficient for semantics (understanding), Rödl insists that judgment is not just assigning truth values but is an act of self-conscious understanding.

That's all for now.

But unlike animals, we don't just respond to them when our immediate drives make them salient. We actively pick them up for purpose of practical or theoretical reasoning, which is possible thanks to our conceptual skills being rationally articulated. — Pierre-Normand

I recall you mentioned Eric Marcus, 'Rational Causation', who writes extensively on this theme. Could you perhaps say a little about him in this context?

So Rodl is just telling us "what anyone always already knows." — Leontiskos

Perhaps it's matter of recollection ;-)

On some metaphysical postulate about some blind drive the universe follows (as well as us), that's further steps more advanced than experiencing or "willing" (in the common usage of the term). — Manuel

That’s not something I postulate, and something that I question in Schopenhauer; I’m much more drawn to the ‘idea’ aspect of his philosophy, than the ‘world as will’ aspect, which I'm frankly sceptical of. (Actually, coming to think of it, I much prefer the Hegelian geist, but never mind.)

Incidentally I went to an open-air social gathering yesterday, a out-door ‘Philosophical Symposium’, the subject of which was 'The Suffering of the World: Schopenhauer's Christian Buddhism.' I hadn't attended before - it was held in a park near Sydney Harbour, convened by an informal group organised by the main speaker (picture below under the Peroni sign.)



I felt the actual lecture concentrated too much on the familiar 'Schopenhauer as pessimist' meme, and not at all on the idealist side of his philosophy, but never mind, it was enjoyable to sit around a table and talk about philosophy with actual people. :wink:

Says who?

Well, if we don't know what it is, how can we say that it is? — Manuel

On the same grounds as Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’: even if you suffered complete amnesia and forgot your identity, you would be aware of your own being. That’s the point about *any* being: on some level it is aware of its distinction from what is other to it. It knows that it is.

We can't step outside what we see to verify whatever it is we see. — Manuel

Buddhists would say that our grasp of reality is inversely proportional to our degree of attachment. But that belongs to another thread (or forum).

"But on this very account, this I is not intimate with itself through and through, does not shine through so to speak, but is opaque, and therefore remains a riddle to itself." ~ Schopenhauer — Manuel

Agree, but the awareness of will is not an appearance. We may not know what it is, but that it is, we can have no doubt.

But we do reach better approximations. And that's what we continue to do. — Manuel

But the uncertainty principle shows that there’s a limit to how exact we can be.

Crikey pointes out that Dutton now has two ministers responsible for reducing government waste... — Banno

that'd be right. Some other imaginary bogeyman for him to winge about. Everyone knows that whenever the Tories cut the public service, they then open the purse to thousands of overpaid consultants from the big end of town, who report to their shareholders, not to the electorate.

Yes, science is metaphysics - in large part, not entirely - because they try to tell us what that nature is. — Manuel

Not necessarily what it is but how it appears - and it's an important distinction.

Neils Bohr: “Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world”.

Werner Heisenberg: “What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

In any case, we do not - and cannot - go beyond appearance. — Manuel

I'd be careful there, it's a big statement!

:pray:

I’ve been thinking about a way to express Berkeley’s esse est percipi without the theological commitment to an all-seeing God or even the (Brahman-like) cosmic intelligence of Kastrup’s Mind at Large. A philosophically neutral alternative is simply to say that what is real, is real for a mind—or even just for 'the observer'. For those who are able to hold to a theistic interpretation, then the Divine Intellect will fulfill that role, but that isn’t strictly necessary for the paradigm to make sense.

If we then ask how to define this mind, the answer is that it cannot be defined in objective terms—because it is not an object. Mind does not appear to us as a phenomenon, but appears as the observer. It is the first-person to whom all experience occurs, meaning that it is never something we can stand outside of and conceptualize as we do with other objects (on any scale). As the old Hindu saying has it, to do so is like the hand trying to grasp itself, or the eye trying to see itself. This is why materialists like Dennett, recognizing that mind cannot be an objective entity, attempt to eliminate it altogether rather than acknowledge its unique status, which undermines their core tenet of the supremacy of objectivity.

This brings us back to Berkeley’s critique of materialism, the assumption that only observed phenomena—the measurable and quantifiable—is real. Because mind itself is never an observed phenomenon, the materialist concludes that mind must be either an illusion or an emergent property of physical processes. This, however, is an assumption, not a conclusion¹. If anything, the inverse is true: the very concept of an objective, external reality depends on the presence of an observer for whom reality appears in the first place.

This position doesn’t entail a theistic framework—it’s simply the recognition that experience always occurs for a mind, hence the indispensability of the subject. Whether one frames this in terms of Berkeley’s God, Kastrup’s ‘Mind at Large,’ or Husserl’s transcendental subject, or even contemporary enactivist approaches to cognition, the underlying point remains the same: the world appears only as structured within awareness or consciousness, within which which the subject of experience is an ineliminable pole.

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1. 'The world is not conclusion/a species stands beyond/invisible as music/but positive as sound' ~ Emily Dickinson.